Deciding Upon Which Social Path to Take

The hardest part of adolescence is never knowing which direction to take. Adolescents question who their real friends are and what a real friend is. Most importantly they question, who they are. They're surrounded by so many stereotypes and struggle to fit the expectations of their middle school or high school peers. Some will do whatever it takes to fit in with the crowd and community. In focusing on young women particularly, some may look up to the image of the ideal woman, which would be the perfect body, intelligence, and wifely personality. Then there are those young girls that want to detach themselves from what society expects from them creating themselves to be who they want to be. These are just some of the issues that arise in Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak. In Speak, Melinda's adolescent experience is shaped through the struggles of maintaining the traditional female role, which portrayed by the majority of female characters in the novel while the protagonist is also trying to defy the gender norms of society.
One of the struggles Melinda is faced with that shapes the way she experiences adolescence, is through the people she encounters in high school who reflect the obvious and stereotypical role of women. Upon not having any friends during her freshman year of high school, Melinda befriends Heather, meanwhile Heather wants to be a part of The Marthas. Attempting to stay friends with Heather, she pressures Melinda: “She corners me after Spanish and begs me to help her. She thinks the Marthas have given her a deliberately impossible job so they can dump her (43). Melinda being soft-spoken doesn’t reject her proposal and rather continues to help Heather. In this specific example, the Marthas reveal the typical female ...

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...ng the social norm makes it more difficult in molding the person. Melinda faces obstacles in only her freshman year choosing what path to take from the many that she’s faced with in the hallways. From Heather, The Marthas, the Cheerleaders she struggles to decide whether or not to be like them. She’s also conflicted as she strives to be like the image that Maya Angelou and the suffragettes reveal. These different women that Melinda comes across allow her to experience and learn from them through the challenges she’s faced. The lack of friends and communication shape her to be submissive to others. When looking at what the suffragettes and Maya Angelou symbolize for women, she takes action upon that too showing how she’s growing and learning from past adolescent experiences. It’s only from the challenges that society brings upon that shape the adolescent experience.